Kevin Smith: Day 152

Colored Pen drawing

This sure took a lot of time and effort to do, but I’m so happy it turned out well. I gave myself some blisters from all that heavy pencil coloring! It’s funny though, I know this has happened plenty of times on previous posts, but when I sit here and type out my immediate thoughts, I stare at the uploaded image of what I drew that day. I look over it and can see all kinds of things that bother me. They could be things that are permanently engraved onto the page and there just isn’t a way to fix it, or other times (which is the case today) it’s something that I missed. Looking at this design and the coloring I did today, I really wish I added some shadows. I think it could really add some awesome dimension to the image overall.

You know what? I’ll be right back. Well, not that it’ll matter when you read this, as you’ll be reading it all in order and the passage of time is impossible to put into text. Well, I guess not impossible…

25 minutes later…

Photoshopped Drawing

There, now I feel much better. The shadow isn’t perfect, but it’s there, that’s what matters. It looks proper now. Well, to my eyes anyways. I just drew in some dark areas with a regular brush with a little transparency using Photoshop. I was originally going to use the colored pencils but it was taking awhile to figure out and if I started to color it in, it’s permanent. So I thought it would be faster, easier, and likely look better, if I just used Photoshop. Seems to be the way to do everything nowadays. Technology, eh? Oh, and I edited one or two tiny little things in the picture that bugged me. I’m sure you can spot the differences. Maybe? I think there’s two, besides the shadows obviously.

So, I didn’t plan to talk about anything special really. Just wanted to get my post up and talk about what I was trying to accomplish. However, I watched this 2 hour podcast last night and I just want to say a few things about it and what it made me realize. First off, here’s the link to the show. It’s on a new channel called Kinda Funny (Twitch for Kinda Funny Games, and Youtube for Kinda Funny). Click the links there and check ’em out!

One of their podcasts featured Kevin Smith recently. I’ve only seen part 1 as part 2 is going up on Kevin Smith’s own podcast called Smodcast later this week. Anyways, so this show made me feel really secure in the decisions I’ve made over the past few years. Especially with this website and everything I’ve created since starting it. This group of friends, the guys interviewing Kevin Smith, just recently quit their jobs and started an online entertainment channel called Kinda Funny. Now they make videos everyday of themselves answering questions about the entertainment industry, play video games with fans, and just mess around. They had a huge following before this so they instantly hit 100,000 subscribers on Youtube  on the first couple days. Safe to say they’ll do fine for themselves in at least the short term.

However, it’s Kevin Smith that does most of the talking here and just about everything he says just made me feel good about myself.  We live in a wonderful time when you really can do whatever makes you happy and get paid to do it. As long as you recognize the consequences of the choices you make and follow through with your goals, you can achieve whatever it is you want. I don’t feel I’m especially good at this whole writing words thing, so I’ll just finish by saying that they really make some wonderful points about going off on your own and trying to do something uniquely you. Kevin Smith puts it wonderfully talking about “The business of being you. I get paid for being Kevin Smith.” paraphrasing here, but yeah, go check it out! I’ll throw the link right here.

Alright, so if you checked out the video, what did you think? Even if you didn’t, what do you think about following your dreams, doing whatever it is that makes you happy, making a business around yourself as an individual? What about the crazy idea of getting paid while still doing something you enjoy? Let me know in the comments!

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Zemus: Day 151

Fine tip marker designFine tip marker design

I’m having a lot of fun doing these designs! Thanks to my sister, I was able to find some awesome paper for drawing these. I used just regular computer paper for the “Zemus” design and even though it leaks through the page, it looks fantastic on the front. I also stole a few sheets to last me a few days! I’m going to keep this up for a little while and continue getting better at it. I can already tell that I’m getting into the groove of making these circular shapes.

I’m definitely going to color the “Zemus” design tomorrow. Not sure exactly how that’ll turn out, but I think it’s the natural next step. Just looking at these black hollow shapes just screams “Color me!”, like an empty coloring book. Growing up I had this “How to draw superheroes and supervillains” book and it had pages with the completed generic superheroes/villains and rather than try to draw any of these guys, which is what the book intended you to do, I would color all the finalized versions of each hero/villain. I wasn’t much into coloring books growing up (as far as I can remember) but I did love coloring those characters.

I’m still undecided on whether I should add a donate button or not. It would take a bit of setting up as I would have to link it to my credit card or something. Or more likely my Paypal account. It just seems weird. I made some artwork for a friend back in October and should be getting paid for it this month, so I definitely want to continue doing that in the future. It makes more sense to me to do the work specifically for someone and then getting paid for it, rather than “Hey, give me money for whatever.” That being said, the donate button will likely go unused anyways, and if I’m completely honest with everything I do, it should be fine. I just don’t want it to hurt my credibility or be looked at negatively in any way.

I’ve already asked this before, but I’m hoping for more responses; What do you think? Please give me honest opinions. Even if you aren’t too sure about how the donations work, just let me know what your initial impressions are if you go to an artist website/blog, and you see a donation button asking for money. Do you have an automatic negative reaction? I’m quite curious. Thanks! Enjoy the rest of your day 🙂

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Hourglass: Day 150

Design with Sharpie Design2

As you can see, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I should be approaching these designs. I began today’s work by trying to add more to what I started yesterday with that hourglass type design. It was going okay for awhile but then my pen started running out of ink. It was getting frustrating, so I decided to finally try these fine tip Sharpies that I’ve had for awhile, and never really used much. I was hoping they would be more pen than marker when I bought them, but they were going right through the paper in my sketchpad and so I stopped using them. Tonight, I tried to find some paper that I own that might work well with these markers. I drew something sort of neat, but just wasn’t feeling it. It almost looks the same on the other side of the paper! Ugh.

So, now I need to find out what I should be using. Perhaps I should just ask the artist that inspired me to try making these designs. Once again (I posted about her page yesterday) you can find her artist Facebook fanpage right here. Do yourself a favor and check out her stuff!

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Inspired: Day 149

Pen design

I’m trying something new out today as I just doodled a bit on paper with a pen. I’ll keep adding to it for the next couple days or something. I think if I fill up the page it should look pretty cool when it’s done. So far so good.

This design was actually inspired by a recent artist I discovered. Her Facebook fanpage can be reached here and her work is pretty amazing. I think I’m going to stick with this stuff for awhile and see how I do. I think if I keep doing a little everyday I could end up with some pretty cool artwork. Especially if I add color! What do you think?

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Peek-A-Boo: Day 133

I swear I'm not on drugs

First off, I want to explain that I’m absolutely not on drugs today. Well, any day really. But today especially! I didn’t have a whole lot of time this morning to get anything super awesome done. I have a Christmas party later on today and so that was a bit of a distraction. So, we have an alien in a fun-house with a balloon hat. Yup. That’s happening right now.

Also, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet in my daily posts (maybe I did once), but I’m in the process of giving an interview for fellow blogger and “Year of Creative Habit” expert, Crystal. She’s just about finished with her year long project (a couple weeks left!) and she wanted to give me an interview via email! It’s been pretty exciting for me, actually. Everything went smoothly and once I send along some pictures of mine to put up then she’s all set to get it posted. I think it’s going to turn out pretty great.

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Ugly Christmas Sweater: Day 132

Christmas Pattern

Today, I made a pretty simple (though it took a a couple hours to make from start to finish) Christmas pattern. I’ve been meaning to do something for the holidays but haven’t really had any ideas. So, today I just started drawing and once I got a decent pattern going, I decided to copy it several times. Then this is what I got! It kinda of looks like something you’d see on one of those ugly Christmas sweaters! Haha

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Frozen: Day 125

Blue, black, and white Photoshop painting titled, "Frozen Notch"

My god, did this ever take forever. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I started making this. At first the small brush strokes that make up the blue, black, and white image took an hour or so, followed by an hour and a half of tiny little notches to cover the entire painting. The things I do to “potentially” make things look cool. I had no clue how this would turn out and honestly, it wasn’t worth it! My hand is sore, and I don’t think it looks like anything special really. However, as always I learned a whole bunch about particular brush settings and color mixing etc. Overall, it was a very positive experience. Here’s what I started with (picture below)

Original Frozen Photoshop painting

Today, I also looked into how to get my artwork printed out. Snapfish.ca seems like a good bet. They have canvas printing which could be pretty neat! I have to look into it some more but this seems like the place I’ll shop at when I’m ready to sell my work. Assuming anyone will actually buy it. Perhaps today’s work isn’t the best example. However, I plan on painting at least 50 paintings in the next couple months so we’ll see if any of them are worth printing out! Either way, it’ll be a fun experience.

So, for tomorrow then, any suggestions? Colors, themes, etc. Anything would be appreciated! Write some in the comments. Thanks, Brad for the “ice” suggestion yesterday.

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